Doing Some Learnin'

I complained a lot in my daily up dates in February about how I was feeling a bit of despair that my book that I'm working on right now, Sunny & Gray, Part II: Gray, wasn't any good, and that all this effort that I was putting in was for nothing. It was making it hard for me to continue writing, because I kept feeling like I was wasting my time. Rish really helped me out when he left this comment on my post:

He was right. I need to give myself permission to suck. Nobody starts out as an expert. Everybody is always improving. Dean Wesley Smith has that post in his Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing where he talks about how writing is practice. He talks about the importance of always learning more about your craft, and then, as you write, make a point to work on something with each story. That's how I got better at football when I was in high school, and it can be how I get better at writing now that high school is so far in the past that I can't even see it on the horizon behind me anymore.

So, I decided I'd start working on things. The first thing I figured I'd delve into is outlining. I had a lot of problems this past month because I did so little in the way of pre-planning that I found myself uncertain what to do next. I didn't know where I was going. I may have to go into that book and edit out a lot of words to make it palatable in the end, because I think I may have rambled a bunch when I found myself in those situations.

So, to make sure that I don't do that again, I want to focus on getting better with outlining. Several years ago, I bought a book about outlining. I can't remember if I ever made it all the way through it or not. I may have lost interest when I stopped writing every day. I can't recall. But the book is still sitting there on my shelf, so I'm going to dust it off and go through it.

I was telling Rish that I was never a very good student back in my school days. When I read stuff, it's usually for entertainment's sake, not to learn things. So, if I'm reading a non-fiction book, I always just read through it like any other fiction book, and then whatever I remember I remember, and the rest just washes over me like water off a waxed car. I don't want that to be the case with this book, though. I want to actually learn something.

So, I've got a plan. I'm going to force myself to take notes, because I'm going to write a blog post about each chapter, what I learned, and how I put it into practice. It'll be like being back in school, and writing a book report. Hopefully, I can make them more interesting than my old book reports ever were though. We shall see.

So, the book is called, Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K.M. Weiland.

I have both the book and the workbook for it.

So, I will go through both of those and see what I can learn, and report back here each step of the way. Shouldn't be long before I have the report from chapter one. Talk to you then.